HiRISE PDS release, Has anyone done anything yet? Options

[Nirgal]

This CTX image would be a good candidate for a calendar though:

Image P01_001558_1325_XI_47S326W

Wow, phaaaantastic !

OWW, could you also post the original link to the image ?
I could not find it at the MSS CTX web-site ...

[djellison]

THEMIS still releases an image every week. Does anyone here look at them?

Yup -I have a THEMIS image of the day item on my dashboard using webclip on OSX.

You have a point about the sustainability. Perhaps it's because the initial 'wow' isn't actually at the science or the image per se - but the capability inferred by the images - the demonstrated ability of the instrument. Once that 'wow - 30cm' or 'wow - 5000 pixels across' has died down - it's hard to find much to be excited about if you're not trained to know what you're looking at.

There are odd-balls to that pattern, you can always get a 'wow - a lander seen from orbit' or 'wow - the Earth!' moment. But generally, I don't think any ammount of outreach effort could maintain a laymans interest in instruments like HiRISE, CTX, THEMIS etc.

What I think I WOULD return to day after day is daily MARCI maps in the way I regularly check into the MODIS rapid response page to see how the UK's looking most days. The MARCI weather reports are a great treat in that regard - nice to see that instrument getting 'out' a little more.

A comparative analysis between MER, Cassini, SOHO, MRO and other missions website stats would be an interesting statistic. I may try and pull together forum-view stats for UMSF to see if the 'traffic' to each section varies in an obvious event-by-event way.

Doug

[OWW]

Nirgal, the image was downloaded from the PDS:
http://pds-imaging.jpl.nasa.gov/Missions/MRO_mission.html
And converted with the img2png tool.

Mcaplinger, I still look at the THEMIS daily releases and I'm sure a lot of people on this board do.
I have to admit I was a bit disappointed that the MOC/CTX daily releases stopped on msss.com. Nirgal's question in the previous post proves that more people hunger for more than the 7 CTX images currently on msss.com. Just dumping it all on the PDS means downloading and converting 50 Mb files, and that may be a bit too much for the average person interested in Mars.

I'm pleasantly surprised though that the weekly weather updates are back:
http://www.msss.com/msss_images/latest_weather.html

Great. Now the same for CTX and I'm in heaven.

EDIT: Doug, you beat me to it on the THEMIS images. So I'm not the only one checking those images as I suspected.

[mcaplinger]

Just dumping it all on the PDS means downloading and converting 50 Mb files, and that may be a bit too much for the average person interested in Mars.

I'll make you all an offer: there are plenty of people on this forum who can process the raw CTX images just as well as we can. Find some images you consider worth sharing from the current released PDS data, process and format them as you like, and I'll link to them from my own page on the MSSS web site and credit you accordingly.

Do it soon and maybe we can get a CTX image on Emily's best of the year list, which would make me very happy.

[mcaplinger]

I'll also point out that the CTX PDS volumes are pretty good; there's a cumindex.tab that has text lines describing each image on every volume, and there's a pre-processed JPEG browse image for each image on the volume.

[Stu]

I'm a big fan of the THEMIS images too, there are some real gems there. I've lost count of the number of times I've stopped what I was supposed to be doing here on my PC and gone back to the recently-released image of Aram Chaos (one of my favourite places on Mars) to just roam around it.

[Nirgal]

Very good discussion here ... love those detail image crops !


Here is another of those "jagged-shadow"-shots (detail crop, tone map enhanced, added (false) colors and
virtual airplane shadow as a 50 meter scale ...

original image link:
PSP_001337_1675

[lyford]

TTHEMIS still releases an image every week. Does anyone here look at them?

Not EVERY week, but yes, I do click when I get Ron Baalke's email.

[gndonald]

I just looked at the image OWW posted and the two 'zoom-ins' that followed. All I can say is WOW!

They are just incredible, you expect to see camels and I swear if something had walked there we'd be able to see the footprints...

Oh for a faster connection...

[OWW]

I'll also point out that the CTX PDS volumes are pretty good; there's a cumindex.tab that has text lines describing each image on every volume, and there's a pre-processed JPEG browse image for each image on the volume.

Thanks. That cumindex.tab file is very helpful for finding the cool places. The line describing the image I posted seems to be incorrect though. It says "Proctor Crater dunes", but actually it's the crater to the east of Proctor. Don't know its name.
Also, all CTX images are mirrored/flipped and brighter in the middle. What's up with that?

I'll make you all an offer: there are plenty of people on this forum who can process the raw CTX images just as well as we can. Find some images you consider worth sharing from the current released PDS data, process and format them as you like, and I'll link to them from my own page on the MSSS web site and credit you accordingly. Do it soon and maybe we can get a CTX image on Emily's best of the year list, which would make me very happy.

Interesting. Well, plenty of people on this forum, bring it on! Personally, I think credits for a cut/paste/stretch job is a bit over the top though, but that's just me.

[OWW]

I just looked at the image OWW posted and the two 'zoom-ins' that followed.

Ehhh, I should point out that my CTX-cutout was 50% of full-resolution. N1ckdrake's 'zooms' are not from the same CTX image but from a HiRise image... for those that hadn't noticed this already.

[mcaplinger]

Also, all CTX images are mirrored/flipped and brighter in the middle. What's up with that?

That's the way they come out of the camera; it's an artifact of the relatively wide angle CTX telescope. There's data on the volumes with all the correction coefficients.

Here's a pretty CTX image I found just by looking at the PDS volumes. It's one of those cracks to the west of Elysium Mons. This is just a small subsection downsampled 2x. For the full impact of CTX, you really need to make mosaics.

[hendric]

Bjorn,
Any chance you could add support for these calibration files to IMG2PNG? I tried it on a data batch, and it looked to me like it wasn't flat-fielding or decompanding. I'll write my own app after the holidays if you don't have time.

[GuyMac]

Can I ask something that's been on my mind for a while? Is anyone else out there wondering why the good folks behind the MRO mission aren't making more of its images? Or taking... oh jeez, how do I put this without sounding ungrateful... more exciting, more stimulating images?

Hi Stu, HiRISE now has around 1500 color images released, something like a third of a Terapixel in RGB color. I've only looked at a small fraction, but it is mind-blowing. I had my desktop display set to show a random chunk from a random each, updated every two minutes, but had to turn it off, because so frequently I was stopping to copy the image into a favorites folder and not getting any work done. :-)

We worked hard to get the color processing automated (better late than never!) and further improvements are in the works (stretches that saturate less pixels, better color band co-registration). There had been great interest in this data on this forum early on!

[Shaka]

I had my desktop display set to show a random chunk from a random each, updated every two minutes, but had to turn it off,

Aaaarrrgghhhhh! (...turns chartreuse with envy...)
How big a bribe would it take to get you to turn it back on and feed it through the web?
(I'd be happy to knit you a monitor cozy, so you wouldn't be distracted... )